March of the
zealots

Every age has its dominant caste. This is the age of the
zealot. Twenty years ago they were dismissed as cranks and fanatics, but now
they are licensed to interfere in the every day lives of ordinary people to an
unprecedented degree. When Bernard Levin first identified the new phenomenon of
the SIFs (Single Issue Fanatics) many of us thought it was a bit of a joke or at
most an annoyance. Now the joke is on us. In that short time they have
progressed from being an ignorable nuisance to what is effectively a branch of
government. They initiate legislation and prescribe taxation. They form a large
and amorphous collection of groups of overlapping membership, united and defined
by the objects of their hatred (industry, tobacco, alcohol, adiposity, carbon,
meat, salt, chemicals in general, radio waves, field sports etc.) Their success
in such a short time has been one of the most remarkable phenomena in the whole
of human history.

Imagine telling somebody
twenty years ago that by 2007, it would be illegal to smoke in a pub or bus
shelter or your own vehicle or that there would be £80 fines for dropping
cigarette butts, or that the words "tequila slammer" would be illegal
or the government would mandate what angle a drinker's head in an advertisement
may be tipped at, or that it would be illegal to criticise religions or
homosexuality, or rewire your own house, or that having sex after a few drinks
would be classed as rape or that the State would be confiscating children for
being overweight. Imagine telling them the government would be contemplating
ration cards for fuel and even foods, that every citizen would be required to
carry an ID card filled with private information which could be withdrawn at the
state's whim. They'd have thought you a paranoid loon.

The vanguard

There is no question that tobacco haters are in the van and
their unflinching, ruthless, mendacious campaign serves as an example to the
rest. Their remarkable success is a spur to the others and their methods a model
to be emulated. These include the gross abuse of the statistical method; the
invention of numbers (particularly body counts, with no actual bodies or
post-mortems) that grow mysteriously with time; the eschewal of anything
approaching the scientific method; above all, the relentless, unceasing drum
beat of propaganda. They never give up. Each tawdry victory strengthens the
appetite for more. Having achieved the ban in public places (i.e. private
property) they now seek to penetrate the home.

In order to get their ban, the activists followed the
advice of Adolf Hitler (The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall
victim to a big lie than to a small one).
They needed to plant an arrant falsehood in the public mind, that second hand
smoke was a deadly poison. The charge was led by the US EPA, who in 1994
published a so-called meta-study that was then a unique example of multiple
statistical fraud and revealed the lowest standards of statistical significance
ever recorded (since greatly bettered by subsequent zealots). Thereafter the
campaigners did not even bother with corrupt science. They simply made
pronouncements that were dutifully reproduced by their allies in the
establishment media. One oft repeated one is that “there is no lower limit for
damage caused by second hand smoke”, which is an example of the concentration
fallacy and a contradiction of the first law of toxicology (the poison is in the
dose). They pioneered the virtual body count, produced from nowhere and endowed
with a remarkable capacity to grow on its own. The British zealots announced a
body count of 1,000 a year (considerably greater pro rata for population than
the EPA claim) which became 4,000 and then 11,000, with no evidence adduced..

It is now a matter
of history that the campaign for a smoking ban was astonishingly successful. It
was not only a bad day for human liberty and freedom of choice, but also defeat
for science and a model for other zealots to embrace dishonesty in their
crusades. At a time of threatened collapse of our society it was remarkable for
its irrelevance. It
offers the activists the ineffable pleasure of being able to oppress and
humiliate a minority on the basis of an apparent justification. The
anti-democratic EU, as always, leads in the suppression
of free speech.

One of the most frequently heard pieces of propaganda is
that passive smoking causes childhood asthma. Children of the fifties did more
passive smoking in one visit to the cinema than modern children do in their
whole lives. Childhood asthma was then virtually unknown. It has increased
steadily in subsequent decades, while environmental tobacco smoke has declined.
It is now a major health
problem. These facts are incontrovertible. Yet to state them is to arouse
wrath. The sad side-effect of the dogma is that it diverts impetus from the
search for the real cause: not a unique result of zealotry.

Collateral damage

Science and its methods have been under ferocious attack
for about a quarter of a century. Even its name has been appropriated by the new
faithful, who despise its traditions of scepticism and openness (take for
example – “The science is settled”. If it is settled it is not science).
Those who call for a return to statistical rigour find themselves pilloried by a
coterie of untiring Australian left-wing academics, using vulnerable vehicles
such as Wikipedia.
The very same people also mount attacks on other deviants, such as those who
question the morality of killing millions of people by the banning of
insecticides. The DDT ban was a human disaster on a horrific scale.

Opponents of the methods of the tobacco zealots were
subjected to the usual ad hominem
attack that they were in the pay of the tobacco industry, to such an extent that
this author felt obliged to republish
every remark he had ever made about that industry, none of them
complimentary. Scientists who actually report politically incorrect results are
pilloried. Critics of the global warming hypothesis are labelled “evil
denialists” and, of course, in the pay of the energy industry (who,
ironically, have actually jumped onto the bandwagon in search of an easy
dollar).

It would be difficult to overstate the effect that the
decline in standards of statistical practice has had on science in general and
medicine in particular. Examples abound, the valuable drug Vioxx was withdrawn
on the basis of a
statistical absurdity, while the multibillion dollar statins industry
flourishes on, to say the least, dubious
grounds. The whole drugs industry is a lottery for unprecedented prizes (and
losses). Junk epidemiology can produce results to order by statistical
insouciance and manipulation. The establishment is able to purchase the
“evidence” it requires.

Our new onus

In this new age we are all enjoined to live as long as
possible, regardless of quality of life. This is strange in a place like
Blair’s Britain, where old age is something to be anticipated with dread. The
lucky ones are merely neglected, while the state strips them of their property
and savings. Before the coming of the zealots, people were entitled to choose
their own life styles and accept the consequences. Not so now! Conformity is the
keyword. Behaviour of which the new elite disapproves is artificially
medicalised and the epidemiologists are on hand to “prove” that all
politically incorrect activity causes mortal disease. A short life and a merry
one, no more: by decree, life has to be long and grim.

Compulsory longevity was a boon to the new authoritarians.
They merely had to establish a link (sometimes real, usually imaginary) between
politically incorrect behaviour and increased mortality to provide a launch pad
for a campaign of fearmongering and control.

Stage two is the publication of limits recommended by the
Government. These are invariably plucked out of the air with no evidence of
reasoning.

Next in the chain of events is the appearance of a body
count. A typical example is the alcohol and breast cancer scare. A junk
epidemiological survey produces a statistically
insignificant result that drinking more than the official limit causes
breast cancer and immediately the Government is broadcasting an imaginary 2,000
deaths a year, then spending ten million of taxpayers’ money to scare
women out of one of their few remaining pleasures. The bigots complain that
the Government is not doing enough to raise taxes and impose controls.

Crises and epidemics

In the world of the zealot, which is now our world, there
are no simple problems. Everything is a crisis, epidemic, disaster or
catastrophe. There is always the need for urgent
action, which usually means taxation, authoritarian control and further loss of
liberty. With typical Gorean hypocrisy, for example, the BMA called for more
taxation of alcohol and a reduction of pub opening hours, while simultaneously
applying for an extension of bar hours in its own headquarters. Doctors are not
worried about the rising cost of alcohol, as their militant trade union has
made them rich beyond the dreams of average.

Finance ministers are only too pleased to be given an
excuse to raise taxes. The disastrously incompetent 2008
UK budget is an illustration; apart from a few stealth taxes on the low
paid, charities etc., it was just a raft of overtly draconian tax increases on
the central mass of the people. All of them had been promoted by zealot groups,
who had also driven the necessary softening up process. That underlines the
change that has been brought about in such a short time; for not long ago the
lobbyists were all appealing for tax reductions.

The obesity crisis

Fat in the new age is deemed unaesthetic. There have been
times when a different view prevailed: it is all a matter of fashion, but now
fat has to be condemned
without trial. The overweening state, by dint of the efforts of the zealots,
demands the
right to determine the shape of its clients.

Zealotry is rich in paranyms.
A paranym is a word used as an evasion, often in a sense that is opposite to its
actual meaning: liberate for conquer,
liberal for authoritarian
etc. Zealots like to change the vocabulary
in this way and paradox is one of
their victims. Time and time again reality diverges from the dogma, so there has
come to be, for example, the obesity
paradox. Never mind though, for one of the first principles of zealotry is
to ignore any contrary evidence. Another of their favourite techniques is to
exploit the end-point fallacy. In Britain, for example, they almost invariably
choose the fifties as a
point of reference, a time when British women had suffered more than a
decade of starvation. In America obesity rates have not changed for seven
years, but are still routinely portrayed as a growing crisis. Over and over
again the obesity scam
is exposed, but the campaigners simply ignore the contrary evidence and march
on.

Chemophobia

The EU is economically doomed. It is controlled by a bunch
of green bureaucrats (anonymous, unelected, unsackable and answerable to no one)
who are not obliged to take into consideration the economic consequences of
their diktats. Its parliament is an impotent talking shop and gravy train. They
seize upon every scare as an opportunity to mount an attack on the
wealth-creating part of the community, namely industry. On the slightest of
evidence they pick on some chemical, or even an element of the periodic table,
and impose a continent-wide ban, without debate or advice from specialists,
other than their favoured green lobbyists. A classic example was the ban on lead
in solder. It was completely unjustified by available
evidence yet imposed virtually without serious thought. Leadless solder is
not only considerably more expensive, it is unreliable, being subject to dry
joints and cracks. We are talking about people being killed here, for there are
now many applications of electronics on which human lives depend, let alone
livelihoods. Notably, military applications were excluded.

Even more Alice in Wonderland is the EU policy on
mercury. Mercury is a non-wetting liquid of low vapour pressure, therefore
relatively safe to handle. Only the vapour form is dangerous, as the mad
hatters of Luton demonstrate. So what did the EU do? They banned the safe
liquid form, therefore destroying minor industries such as tradition barometer
manufacture; then they subsequently insisted that the whole population of the
continent replace their incandescent light bulbs with inadequate substitutes
operating with mercury vapour, all on the basis of the vague global warming
hypothesis.

Dioxins (which are invariably and unwarrantably described
in the establishment media as cancer-causing) in fact cause only one known
disease, and that only at high doses, chloracne, as the would be assassins ofViktor Yushchenko discovered.
Fear of dioxins is used to support the banning of incineration, which is the
most sensible way to recycle garbage.

Dwarfing every other assault on European industry by means
of chemophobia, however, is the REACh Directive. It requires the registration
and control of some 30,000 chemicals. It was the brainchild of one Michael
Meacher (a man of such monumental ignorance that, after years as an
environmental spokesman and minister, he thought El Niño was a hurricane).
Among the sufferers were British manufacturers of paints and plastics, who were
forced to give
their away secret recipes to low-cost Far East competitors. The cost of this
extravaganza of pointless sacrifice is incalculable, but it is certainly in the
region of hundreds of billions of Euros, and is a major contributor to the
project to de-industrialise Europe.

And these are the people to whom British MPs have
transferred, without permission of the electorate, the powers delegated to them.
Bizarre or what?

Salt

Weirdest of all, but so typical, is the anti-salt campaign.
It seems to have no other function than to keep the names of certain professors
in the newspapers. The paucity of the evidence
offered in contrast to the drama of the claims and the draconian nature of
the demanded action is quite startling, but so characteristic of the genre.

Salt is one of the most basic essentials of human life.
You can taste it in your blood, sweat and tears. Animals were able to leave the
sea by taking it with them in their blood plasma. Instinct drives them to salt
licks when they are short of it. Salt deficiency (hyponatraemia)
can be quite serious. It is reckoned to affect, for example, about 10% of
marathon runners and one died from it in the 2007 London event. The physiology
of maintaining the salt balance (homeostasis) has been well understood for many
years. The body can correct salt excess by the simple process of excretion, but
it cannot correct salt deficiency.

Some causes are born politically incorrect, some achieve
political incorrectness and some have political incorrectness thrust upon them.
The humble salt tablet is one of the latter. It was once a routine precaution
for athletes and those working in tropical climes, but now is hard to come by in
politically correct parts of the world, such as tropical Australia, where people
are now expected to endure painful cramps and other deficiency symptoms. The
salt scare has all the characteristics of a classical campaign of zealotry (see,
for example, Taubes)
including the complete disregard for human comfort and even life. As in the
other campaigns, the battering ram is a “recommended limit”, plucked out of
the air with no attempt at reasoning, but just right to add to the grimness of
modern life.

Why now?

We find ourselves at what is known as a juncture. Huge
changes in human society are being accelerated by speed of communication and
efficiency of data storage and retrieval. World institutions such as the UN and
EU are turning away from democracy and towards authoritarian bureaucracy. A new
class of professional politician has emerged that is insulated from the real
world of earning a living. In Britain this means taking PPE at Oxford (the
bluffer’s degree), becoming a political advisor and then being granted a safe
seat in Parliament. Age and experience are mocked. Because of the trend towards
micromanagement by government, people who have never run anything find
themselves running everything. The quality of our politicians is at a nadir,
reflected in the apathy of the electorate at election time. They are lazy,
ill-informed, inept and nest-feathering to an unprecedented degree. They incline
to the easy route of going along with the lobbyists rather than going to the
effort of forming an opinion for themselves, preferring to stay within their
closed environment, isolated from the outer world of evidence and opinion. The
villages of Westminster and Washington are hothouses, insulated from the rest of
the human race, where politicians, journalists and lobbyists talk almost
exclusively to each other.

There is a void at the heart of politics, which the zealots
have rushed in to fill. Politicians have always indulged in empty rhetoric,
though formerly they also held beliefs, but now the whole emphasis is on winning
the next election. The sound-bite is all. Policy has been replaced by slogans.
From Blair to Obama and all between the script is similar. One word “change”
is used the way stage magicians use the word Abracadabra.

Blair is the archetypal 21st Century politician.
His New Labour Project had the one aim of winning an election. For the new world
of television and short attention spans, his team adapted the techniques ofsound-bite and spin that had been developed in the USA and were
phenomenally successful, but they carried those into government, with no
policies for the growing problems of the new age other than throwing
taxpayers’ money at them. His slogans were legendary (Tough
on crime, tough of the causes of crime; education,
education, education; things can only
get better etc.) Things only got worse, across the whole spectrum of
national life. It transpired that the catchphrases were all there were.
Nevertheless, the watchword was “change”. Blair, the eternal actor, took the
part of eco-theologian but in reality he was the ego-theologian.

Blair imitators, such as Cameron and Obama compete to get
as many mentions of the word “change” into their speeches as they can.Of course, the word itself, tout
court, effectively has no meaning without an object. “Change your underwear” has a
meaning, but the word alone is vacuous, which is the essence of its attraction
to modern politicians, as the word “new” is to the advertising industry. One
of Asimov’s many prophetic conceits in the Foundation
Trilogy was the computer analysis of an ambassador’s long speech, which
established that he had said precisely nothing. So it is with these new
charismatic politicians, whose rhetoric and promises are as nebulous as the
morning mist. Television has created this dominant class of politician –
youthful, pretty, inexperienced and insulated from real life, plausible to the
non-analytical admass and deft with the sound-bite.

Likewise journalism is at a low ebb. The more ardently they
proclaim their professionalism (in contrast with those beastly bloggers) the
less they evince it. Campaigning investigative journalism is dead and gone.
Politicians, media and zealots live in a cosy symbiotic relationship.
Politicians and journalists are indolent, while the zealots are hyperactive. It
makes life easy for politicians and journalists if they are presented with ready
written cases, which the zealots are only too willing to provide in their
copious press releases. You can see clear examples of this by comparing
newspaper coverage of a campaign. Articles appear under the by-line of one or
more journalists, yet the wording is virtually identical in several newspapers.
Indeed, it makes you wonder how many journalists, particularly environmental
editors, justify their wages, when you look at the paucity of their original
output over a week. Politicians, likewise, are only too happy to speak from a
pre-digested script. They also relish the opportunity to create a diversion from
the many real problems that they have failed to tackle. Consider, for example,
Gordon Brown and the NHS
or plastic
bags. There was nothing positive he could say about the NHS, which is an
unmitigated disaster, so he attacked the usual
suspects by way of a diversion. Fat smokers are threatened with denial of a
service for which they have been obliged to pay (in the smokers case far more
than any one else). Journalists also serve by applying ratchet reporting (such
as ignoring global cold weather and celebrating warm) and they possess
conveniently short memories (so can, for example, report the admission by one of
those involved that the ludicrous recommended alcohol limits were simply
made up, then the next week headline dangerous drinking by those who
marginally breach them).

Behind it all lurks the overweening bureaucracy. Overpaid,
overperked and underworked, insidious and international, they build their
empires and extend their tentacles of control into the very heart of the lives
of ordinary people.

Research and educational policies are decided by people who
think mathematics means arithmetic and have no conception of physics at all.
Real research has all but come to an end, being largely replaced by populist
surveys designed to catch the eye of the popular media. Mickey Mouse
universities offer frivolous courses, while school children are subjected to a
treadmill of continual testing between bouts of propaganda.

In short, people are being deprived of the mental equipment
to make a judgement of their own on any matter of importance. So Orwellian!

Meanwhile, the activists make it their business to
penetrate and seize control of the most influential institutions of society,
such as the political parties, the BBC and the Royal Society. They have command
of huge financial resources, pump primed by the foundations (the so-called
ketchup money) and then augmented by diversion of taxpayers’ and charities’
money. One of the most egregious of the many corrupt practices of the EU is to
give money to the activist groups to enable them to lobby itself.

This, then, is the field on which the zealots play. Their
opponents are silenced by an unstated but firm censorship, all done by informal
collusion. They give the establishment that valuable commodity of an excuse for
displacement activity. Bans, taxes and coercion are relatively easy to
implement; whereas the seriously mounting problems of a sick society are hard
and uninviting.

The sins of the few shall
be visited on the many

Old Tom does not come to the pub any more. For seventy five
years his one great treat was to sit quietly in the corner and enjoy a harmless
pipe of tobacco and a pint of ale in the inscribed silver tankard that the
regulars gave him to mark his ninetieth birthday. Now the zealots have banned
his pipe and taxed his pint out of reach. He does not understand why. When there
is a cheap wine or spirits offer in the local co-op, it is the old-age
pensioners who form the queue, striving to restore a little colour in their
bleak existence. Yet the zealots urge the raising of alcohol taxes and the banning of
special offers.

The excuse is the existence of bands of drunken youths in
town centres. The bans are called for by those who are often the very people who
were responsible for creating the problem of alienated feral youth in the first
place, by such policies as the destruction of discipline in schools and
undermining the institution of marriage. Alcohol is not the cause: it is just
one means by which the disaffected young express their defiance. There are a few
more fat people around, so the whole population has to be harangued into an
anorexic conformity.

Promotion
of limits and constraints that are simply invented without reason

Collusion
by the establishment media

Damage
to science and its methods

Elimination
of things that make life bearable

Making
some people very rich while impoverishing the lives of almost everyone else.

They will not be satisfied until they have you shivering in
a cave, sipping thin gruel.

The greatest of these movements, rich in all the above
characteristics, is the eco-theological one, which has morphed into the anti-carbon
crusade. It is a world-wide phenomenon of historically unprecedented
magnitude and power. The demonisation of carbon, the very basis of all
life on earth, can only be explained as a
religious phenomenon. Its sheer perversity is its attraction: for faith
requires an element of absurdity in its object. It requires no faith to believe
that the apple will fall downwards from the tree. The carbon campaign is the
pinnacle of the movement that began modestly with the earliest impositions of
political correctness.

When the world thought that the New Right was in the
ascendancy during the Reagan-Thatcher years, it was the New Left that was
quietly gathering momentum. Like a snowball rolling down a hill it picked up
mass as it went along. The membership was many and various (followers of Rachel
Carson, Marxist academics, draft-dodgers, sputniks left homeless by the collapse
of the Soviet Empire, idealistic youth etc.) They were characterised by the
things that they hated (industry, capitalism, free markets, bourgeois
complacency, open science etc.)

A significant development was the evolution of the concept
of political correctness. As had been foreseen by Orwell, the control of
language was the key to political power:

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to
narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally
impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

It began to be applied rigorously in American universities
and as it spread it came to be applied not just to vocabulary but to hypotheses
(such as global warming) and objects (such as salt tablets). It became the means
by which even the discussion of anything distasteful to the New Left was
verboten. As the establishment media were penetrated and taken over, a rigorous,
voluntary self-censorship was imposed.

The global warming hypothesis was a godsend to the New
Left. It provided a means of attacking industry and capitalism through the one
great essential to modern life, energy. Anyone who questioned the dogma was
subject to insults and threats, including the appalling crudity and
tastelessness of being likened to the holocaust deniers. All realistic proposals
to develop workable sources of energy are bitterly opposed by the green network,
while patently stupid ones, such as wind turbines, are sustained by regulation
and subsidy, with the added bonus of bringing down the free market. There are
related areas of activity, such as
biofuels, which not only threaten the world with greenflation
but also starvation.

Above it all towers the figure of Al Gore, hyper-hypocrite
and monster of monetary concupiscence. If just occasionally he turned up on a
bike rather than his private jet (or waived the six figure fee for his
repetitious diatribes, or engaged in debate rather than diktat) he might
entertain some credibility among the reasoning few. It is, however, in the
nature of the faithful that they turn a blind eye to the
defects of their demagogues. Perhaps the one fact that restores one's faith
in humanity is that the blanket coverage of the propaganda has failed
to stir a majority of the populace, though in the new age majorities have no
power.

Global warming has now got to the stage where it is only
maintained by media self-censorship. If the general public ever got to know of
the scandals surrounding the collection
and processing of data, or that there
has been no
detectable warming for the last decade, the whole movement would be dead in
the water; but they don’t, so it isn’t. It has become the most powerful myth
in human history, sending much of the world into a downward helix of economic
decline. It is a tenuous hypothesis supported by ill-found computer models and
data from botched measurement, dubiously processed.

Envoi

After the above was finished and ready for posting, it was
time for a pub break. The popular, recently-retired barmaid, Andrea, offered a remark
that seemed to sum it all up: “We used to have such fun. Why isn’t there any
fun anymore?”